Sophia Nimphius did a great study about calculating how much weight someone has carried over their life. Boys and male bodies, by the time they get to age 20, have carried tens of thousands more pounds than female bodies in general. That then makes women’s muscles smaller and bones less strong, and that continues throughout life.
Credit: Basic Books, courtesy of author
You write about some of the things that women are particularly good at that haven’t been as traditionally understood or acknowledged, particularly endurance.
I try not to make too many evolutionary biology arguments, but human beings did a lot of labor in pre-industrial societies. There was a lot of repetitive, low-impact work, like tanning a hide or taking an animal apart to cook and eat it, grinding grain or making dough. So having endurance in that type of activity is an advantage because that’s the labor that most people were doing most of the time.
Sandra Hunter proved that female bodies are particularly good at this. She was doing her PhD at Marquette, and she was trying to figure out what direction her PhD was going to take. She thought, I’ll do this basic test to learn how [muscle strength] works and get the machinery down. The test was just a person sitting in a chair and pushing up on a weight. If you could lift max 40 pounds, then she would give you 25 or 30 pounds, and if you could lift 100 pounds, it would be 50; it was calibrated to your own strength. She found that women were able to just keep going for 20 to 30 minutes, and most men were unable to go past about five minutes. She went through a whole process of figuring out, Why is this? Is there a problem with my study design? And she finally realized, no, there’s actually more endurance ability in female muscles.
They think it’s probably linked to fat, and that this longer fat-burning is really important for anything that’s going to take this type of energy. That gives an advantage to anyone who is doing ongoing labor for survival. When we think about more modern people, we see endurance athletes able to utilize this. Now it’s well-accepted that female muscles are more resistant to fatigue than male muscles are, but we didn’t know this until 15 to 20 years ago because nobody had looked at it.
You talk about the fact that medical studies have been so totally tailored to the male body, which means positive capacities have also been understudied. How do you think that research gap has affected how far behind we still are in terms of understanding this stuff?
A lot of that work comes out of sports science research. There are so many good examples. One is that the female surfers weren’t lifting weights until recently, in the last five or six years. They’ve then improved their performance tremendously just by gaining strength, probably because besides surfing, they hadn’t ever been doing anything to build those types of muscles for cultural reasons. There are also examples from many other sports where the kind of training that was normal for boys has now finally been introduced for women.
Similarly, certain things simply haven’t been studied. For example, in Australia, Caroline Gargett is studying stem cells in menstrual blood, but even their existence there wasn’t known until 20 years ago, because men before were like, Ew, menstrual blood, icky, we’re not going to examine that.
In tennis, women play three sets and men play five sets, and thinking about that really made me grind my teeth when I was reading your endurance section; there are obviously lots of examples in sports of women being asked to do less physically. You write about the possibility of desegregating sports, or separating athletes by other metrics, like weight.
When you’re talking about having people of all sexes competing against each other, it gets really bogged down in cultural problems. If you eliminate male and female teams and you have one team, then you have fewer teams, and then fewer athletes, and everybody gets to compete less and there’s less money. I talked to the people in women’s wrestling—wrestling’s already divided by weight, there’s no reason that you wouldn’t just keep doing it by weight, and then who cares about gender? But then you’d have fewer opportunities for everybody. There are strong arguments from athletes themselves saying, We would lose money. Female athletes especially, saying, We’ve struggled so long to get to a place where now we’re actually being taken really seriously. Female wrestling is growing and now becoming kind of big. But it needs a lot more support and a lot more money and training. And if you combine the genders, then where does that leave high school girls learning how to do this sport and getting funding for it? So I totally hear that and that’s important—but that’s cultural.
Integration happens naturally in endurance sports and ultra-races. Some of those races do actually separate by gender, but a lot of them don’t. Even without the training and the money and the support and the lifetime of physical experience (and more childcare responsibilities, and the other obstacles that female athletes face), women are still doing really well and sometimes winning. It’s so amazing to me, after really going through all of the ways that female athletes are not given as much opportunities and support, that they’re able to win it all. What if they were supported? What if we did divide kids and then adults by strength abilities? What would we find?
I want to ask about the flip side of women-specific advantages, like autoimmunity and increased chronic pain. You write about the incredibly strong female immune system, which can be both a blessing and a curse.
There are very real disadvantages to having a really, really strong immune system. There are illnesses that kill men that women survive, but they have chronic issues after that. Their bodies didn’t do anything wrong; they saved them. But the women themselves are then left with the repercussions of that.
In the future, we may understand that we have to modulate the female immune system through a certain period of life. Maybe at 13, all girls get something so that your immune system is strong when you need it, but doesn’t overreact when you don’t because we no longer live in a time when we’re fighting off 27 diseases before we’re 10 years old.
Then when it comes to pain, researching it is so complicated and difficult. We all have the hundred million messages we’ve heard about how we understand pain and how our gender understands pain and how our race understands pain. There’s so much cultural baggage around pain that it is very, very difficult to write about and look at what differences there might really be or not. I think there are going to be some interesting sex differences, and when we learn what those are, we will then be able to treat pain between male and female bodies a little bit differently from the get-go. That will then impact how chronic pain ends up impacting people and being a more solvable problem.
I really appreciated how much you factor ideas about trans people, gender identity, and transition into the book. How did you approach this subject?
There’s a cultural assumption that there are huge differences between male and female bodies, but in most areas, that is not the case. There may be differences, but where there are differences, they are small. Usually, you are talking about a 10% difference, which, if you’re running a very short distance in a short period of time, is a big deal. If you’re running 100 miles, it basically is negligible. As we understand, embrace, and include trans bodies more, we will be forced to understand that a trans woman isn’t going to automatically win the race because she’s a trans woman. Testosterone isn’t a magical drug that just makes people better at all physical activities. But there is still a very wide acceptance of this idea, and it’s very frustrating.
In other places around the world, not necessarily in the U.S. or the U.K. at this point, trans people are being included more—in all the major marathons, for example. Seeing trans women actually compete will challenge this idea that just having an originally biologically male body gives you some sort of gigantic advantage.
Also, there is so much interest in the trans community in exploring how trans bodies and their experiences can add to how we understand all bodies and health information and hormones (and how they impact different types of bodies at different ages). It is a gift to humanity that some people are interested in participating in that.
If I were a trans person right now, I don’t know if I’d want to do that, but there are people who definitely have the long vision, or are in places that are more accepting of trans people and aren’t getting as much pushback as we’re all experiencing now in the U.S. and in the U.K. Once we get over ourselves and our obsession with the gender situation and we embrace everybody as human—like we have embraced female bodies in science—we’ll be able to learn more stuff. People are always getting in their own way.
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